After a federal immigration agent fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Mayor Jacob Frey called the U.S. government’s account of what happened “bullshit.” State legislators chimed in, lamenting a “hostile federal government.” And Gov. Tim Walz derided what he called a federal “propaganda machine,” saying that the shooting was both “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.”
The outpouring of anger from the Democrats who govern Minnesota marked a boiling-over point in a rhetorical fight with the Trump administration that had been building for weeks.
The next steps in that dispute seemed uncertain.
Federal officials, who vowed to continue a surge of immigration enforcement work in the Minneapolis area despite protests, defended the shooting on Wednesday as necessary and lawful.
“This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Frey and Mr. Walz both warned demonstrators to stay peaceful, stating their belief that the federal government was looking for a pretense to deploy the military on Minnesota’s streets.
“Do not take the bait,” Mr. Walz said. “Do not allow them to deploy federal troops into here. Do not allow them to invoke the Insurrection Act. Do not allow them to declare martial law.”
Bad blood between Mr. Walz and President Trump is nothing new. Mr. Trump has long criticized the governor’s handling of the riots that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the pair exchanged campaign-trail insults in 2024 when Mr. Walz was the Democratic nominee for vice president. When a gunman killed a Democratic Minnesota state legislator and her husband last year, Mr. Trump said he had no plans to call Mr. Walz, whom he described as “whacked out.” Mr. Walz, for his part, criticized immigration agents last year as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.”
But that mutual distaste morphed into a far more tangible clash in recent weeks, as the president and his allies portrayed Minnesota as a failure of liberal governance, citing a fraud scheme that resulted in hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars being pilfered from social service programs. The president began describing Minnesota’s large Somali diaspora, whose members make up a majority of the fraud defendants, in especially derisive terms. Immigration agents briefly surged into the state last month, sometimes clashing with residents.
All of it was prelude to this week, when the federal government announced the deployment of around 2,000 agents to the Minneapolis area in what it said was its “largest operation to date.” The mobilization, they said, was necessary to crack down on fraud and to root out illegal immigrants. Plans for the surge continued after Mr. Walz announced on Monday that he was dropping his campaign for a third term as governor.
“Dropping out of the race won’t shield him from the consequences of his actions,” a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said.
As the agents began arriving in Minnesota, state and local leaders warned that it would create chaos and that people could get hurt.
When that prediction came true on Wednesday, federal officials blamed the woman who was killed and “sanctuary politicians.” Minnesota leaders said it was the fault of the federal government.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
The post Minnesota Was Long at Odds With the Trump Administration. It’s Boiled Over. appeared first on New York Times.
